Fellow Chinese reader, please welcome Joan Chen, the "diva" in Chinese film industry context. With so many awards in hand, I'm pleased to see her taking on a role, without famous Chinese directors, or the many stories about war epic that we see amass nowadays. Just a little simple storyline, few characters, portraying the core values keeping a family together, or not really.
The Home Song Stories is one of my accidental discoveries of hidden gems because right from the beginning, I wasn't really keen about watching this movie until I read the line below in IMDB.com
"Australia's official submission in the Foreign Language Film category for the 80th Academy Awards"
Right after that, I headed off to a wild dig for this movie and I watched it immediate after I found it. And 103 minutes later, I was left gasping for air, not because the storyline was suffocating but the details in the scenes, the delicate lines to bring out the characters, and the emotions that were immense enough to keep me gripping tight so that I missed nothing.
In all, the director, Tony Ayres has done a great job of bringing his life story to the big screen and escaping the result of many boring and disastrous autobiographical films ended up as. The movie is about what Ayres remembers about his mother, a songstress who uprooted her children and migrated from Hong Kong to Australia after marrying an Australian sailor, and their struggles to etch a living surviving in a stranger's land. The intensity starts when we see Rose ( the songstress ) succumbed to her weakness for men quite easily, falling fast and hard, switching from man to man, being unlucky in love, and causing embarrassment for her children, who do not know what to make out of the “Uncles” that come through the door or a suicidal mother after each heartbreak.
IMHO, Joan Chen captures the complexity of Rose’s character superbly, one character that I've heard about so frequent since childhood, from gossips, rumours or speculations on certain people you met in the neighbourhood. You just see characters you once heard so much about, being casted on screen alive. The feeling is really immense. Meanwhile, Joel Lok gives a watchful and intelligent performance, as the son, Tom, who worships his mother and must witness her pain, even when blocking his ears and shutting his eyes. It's amazing & surprising that both Joel Lok & Irene Chen are just newcomers, yet able to show such level of maturity and natural flair of acting skills in portraying Tom & May, even as fantastic as the actual Tony Ayres and his sister, Mei.
At its core, The Home Song Stories evokes painful memories, but also brings about the notion of forgiveness, remembering and honouring those memories. A mother’s love knows no bounds, even if she behaves in a manner you cannot quite grasp at the moment.
The one line that moved me was in almost the last few scenes:
“It is extraordinary,” as grown up Tom says about himself and his sister, “that we ended up perfectly ordinary people.”
Note: The trailer might not move you much, but it's definitely a movie I'll purchase the DVD for collection or watch when it's in local cinemas.
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